12 Tlie New Forest : its History and its Scenery. 



The same cliurches rear their towers, and the mills still stand 

 by the same streams. 



The peasants, too, still value the woods, as they did in the 

 Conqueror's time, for the crop of mast and acorns, — still peel off 

 the Forest turf, and cure their bacon by its smoke.* The 

 charcoal-burner still builds the same round ovens as in the days 

 of William the Red. Old-English words, to be heard nowhere 

 else, are daily spoken. The last of the old Forest law-courts 

 is held every forty days at Lyndhurst. The bee-master — beo- 

 ceorl — still tends his hives, and brews the Old-English mead, and 

 lives by the labours of his bees. The honey-buzzard still makes 

 her nest in the beeches round Lyndhurst, and the hen-harrier on 

 the moors near Bratley. 



I suppose this is what strikes most persons when they first 

 come into the New Forest, — a sense that amidst all the change 

 which is going forward, here is one place which is little altered. 

 This is what gives it its greatest charm, — the beauty of wildness 

 and desolateness, broken by glimpses of cultivated fields, and 

 the smoke of unseen homesteads among the woods. 



Yet the feeling is not quite true. Like every other place 

 in England, it has suffered some change, and moved with the 

 times. Instead of the twang of the archer's bow, the sunset 

 gun at Portsmouth sounds every evening. The South-Western 

 Railway runs through the heart of it ; and in place of the 

 curfew's knell, the steam whistle shrieks through its woods. 



We do not see the Forest of our forefathers. Go back eight 

 centuries, and look at the sights which the Normans must 

 have beheld, — dense underwoods of hollies on which the red 



* The Avoods, in Domesday, are, as we shall see, generally valued by 

 the number of swine they maintain. 



12 



